Earlier quoted context omitted.
The vaccine does two things; it reduces the chance of getting covid (not terribly effectively, for Omicron), and it reduces the average severity of cases (very effectively). "Breakthrough" is where it fails on the first point; failure would imply failing in _both_ cases. So you could possibly call the hospitalised cases failure (though even then, hospitalised vaccinated cases are on average less severe and less likel…
This depends on which definition of the vaccine you've chosen to adopt. As the product has not changed, only the manufacturers claims about it, the original definition is the most applicable in terms of its success or failure. What's misleading is to pretend that a product, sold as a "vaccine", sold as originally possessing many of the commonly-understood qualifiers of the use of that term, turns out in reality to po…
It reduces the chances of all three, and _dramatically_ reduces the chances of the last two. That's what vaccines do. Now, it's not a _great_ vaccine. There are a couple of magic bullet near-100% effective vaccines (for instance, only 3% of people with the MMR vaccine exposed to Measles will get Measles, and the smallpox vaccine is 95% effective), and there are some... less effective ones (assuming the right strain is targeted the flu vaccine is 40-60% effective at preventing infection, and reduces chances of death somewhat).
Hopefully better vaccines will become available, but for now we are where we are.
I mean, if you want to say "only things with >90% efficacy at preventing infection are vaccines"... okay, but what do you want to call all the vaccines that that excludes?
> These "vaccines" limited effects at reducing symptoms (the only remaining claim of late), do not even persist more than a week or two before beginning to wane to nothing
Eh? Where are you getting that? It does look like efficacy vs _infection_ diminishes rapidly (at least for two doses; insufficient evidence to say anything with great certainty about three doses so far), but a two-dose course from last year remains quite effective at preventing severe outcomes (though less effective than three doses).
> These are at best therapeutic drugs, not vaccines.
They're not therapeutic drugs at all; if you give the vaccine to someone who _currently has covid_ it won't help them (at least for that particular case of covid).
> That is, they are - broadly - failures.
In Ireland, we have about 95% adult vaccination. Most of our current ICU cases are unvaccinated under-65s; there are almost no vaccinated under-65s, and a small number of vaccinated over-65s (essentially all over-65s are vaccinated). I would not call this a _failure_, at all. If the ICU rate was the same in the general population as in the unvaccinated population, ICU capacity would be exhausted and people would die needlessly. Preventing that is a success.